Citizen Vigilante: A Review

There are dozens of revenge and vigilante movies and, from a cinematic, aesthetic point of view, Citizen Vigilante is amongst the very worst of the genre. But it is culturally and politically important, and has been made so by the attention brought to it by its ideologically motivated detractors and its de facto banning by the German state. The reason it was banned and is being attacked by progressive critics is that the film drew attention to migrant crime, rape in particular, and explicitly criticised mass, and especially Muslim, immigration. Citizen Vigilante broke what is an assiduously policed taboo in Western culture, the first mainstream cultural product to have done so since Michel Houllebecq’s 2015 novel Submission.

As well as dozens of B movies, many of them excellent, the vigilante genre (I use ‘vigilante’ to mean a person or group of people who use violence or the threat of it to administer justice in the absence of effective action by the state) also includes cinematic masterpieces, such Ingmar Bergman’s transcendent The Virgin Spring (1960), Get Carter (1971), The Wild Bunch (1968), Straw Dogs, Rolling Thunder (1977), Lady Snowblood (1973) Ms.45 (1981), The Unforgiven (1992), and The Big Heat (1953). Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974) is perhaps the most well-known of all vigilante movies, in which Paul Kersey, played by Charles Bronson, becomes a vigilante, following the rape of his daughter and murder of his wife after a home invasion.

Death Wish, like Citizen Vigilante, was called ‘fascist’ in some quarters, as such films often are by progressive critics. However, fascist states use agents of the state for their violence to consolidate their ideology, have corrupt judiciaries and use impunity for criminals to sow an atmosphere of fear to intimidate the population. Seen in this light, both Citizen Vigilante and Death Wish are anti-fascist. Death Wish came during a period in which there was a huge uptick of crime in US cities, especially rapes and stranger murders, coinciding with a period of progressive tendencies in the justice system that were seen by some law enforcement officials and the public as favouring the criminal, just as in today’s Europe.

Before Citizen Vigilante’s opening credits the atmosphere is set by a scene of a young woman out shopping with her young son in a city in an unnamed European country, who is stabbed in the neck by an undocumented migrant. Following news reports on the crime, which mention the Citizen Vigilante’s other killings, such as the killing of a “migrant crime syndicate”, we see the Citizen Vigilante, ‘Sanders’, an American ex-pat, tooling up from his impressive arsenal of weaponry and then shooting dead a trio of migrant thugs about to collect on a shopkeeper as part of a protection racket.

Citizen Vigilante is episodic and non-linear, with no plot as such. The action sequences are interrupted by news reports, statements put out on the TV about Sanders’s exploits, clips of him broadcasting himself to justify his actions – presumably for broadcast on the internet – and scenes of him being interrogated, though we don’t see him being apprehended or find out by whom. There’s are also interpolated social media clips of the public praising him and complaining about migrants which are as naff as the tweets appearing on screen in Chef (2014).

Expressionless throughout, Sanders is a sententious bore, enunciating lines such as “we are in a state of sleep paralysis” and, contradictorily, “the people will not accept a takeover” in an affectless monotone. Sanders is just a cipher, there’s no character development, and there’s nothing to make us empathise with him, nothing that has personally happened to him to fire a thirst for vengeance. What personality Sanders does have indicates he’s a bastard, a slum landlord and brothel owner who uses his own whores.

We’re told vaguely that he is ‘ex-military’ to account for his weaponry and skill with it, and it is when there’s attempt to arrest him by a SWAT-like police battalion that he shoots the most people, all, incidentally, white. It is over the top and quite amusing – a cop’s head exploding absurdly from his helmet at one point. In one scene, he swaps drinks that two guys have spiked so that they, and not the intended female victims, are drugged. The earnest homily Sanders delivers to them afterwards is funny, though I’m still not sure if the humour was deliberate or not.

As Sanders drives a judge to the place appointed for the suicide he is going to fake for him, one of several he murders, he delivers another homily, during part of which he continues talking to the judge even though he is drugged unconscious, and forces a car off the road by refusing to change lanes as he drives towards it, killing the occupants, to make a point about conformity. It’s these more ridiculous, humorous parts of the film that redeem it: you can’t judge Sanders as a character for such actions; he’s a highly stylised filmic construct. A clip of this judge giving a press conference is included in which he justifies not convicting some migrant gang rapists by saying that the “gang rape was in a way a cry for help” and “not only the young girl was the victim”.

The scene that led to the film to be condemned is when Sanders invades the home of a migrant who has escaped prison for his part in a gang rape. He shoots the rapist, his father, sister, mother and the other rapists, whom he forces his victim to call to his apartment. He discusses the case with the father and sister before killing them, and they both try to rationalise the crime: the sister says that European girls “just make boys horny with their miniskirts” whilst the father claims “I just taught him the values of the Koran”. Very few rape-revenge films prolong or show the act of rape in any detail and Citizen Vigilante is no different, we see the rape at the heart of the film only through some reaction shots of the sister, who witnessed the attack, filmed with almost comical cackhandedness.

This scene led to Germany’s ratings board to refuse the film an age classification, effectively banning it, in order, the board claimed, “to avoid inciting violence against migrants”. But logically, there’s no reason why a film, any more than a regular news stories on the same lines, would incite anti-Muslim violence. If 9/11, 7/7, Bataclan, the rape gangs and the Manchester Arena bombing didn’t incite anti-Muslim violence it’s absurd to imagine that anything ever will.

Those who have criticised Citizen Vigilante because it might lead to copycat killings are surely then speaking in bad faith. The film has a much lower body count than John Wick (2014) in which there’s mass slaughter to avenge the killing of a small dog, and Benicio del Toro’s character in the critically fêted Sicario (2015) also slaughters a whole family, including two children, of the man he is avenging. There have been dozens of vigilante movies over the years, and I can’t remember coming across a single copycat incident. This is because the films are essentially escapist, wish-fulfilment movies. They are cathartic, and the films themselves provide emotional closure and release.

Vigilantism

One reason that audiences have an enduring taste for revenge and vigilante movies is because, after sex, revenge is probably the thing most wished for and daydreamed about. Their enduring popularity points to more people approving of vigilantism than might be thought; as cinema audiences, if not in society, we accept them, we vicariously share their rage, impatient for justice to be fatally administered, and nobody roots for the murderer or rapist. Some might say they appeal to the worst in us, but what if they also, perhaps even more so, appealed the best in us? The empathy for the helpless victim, the desire for truly proportionate justice to be done and the eradication of evil?

In one sense some of these films are philosophical in that they raise the question of what one should do when the state, which rightly has a monopoly on violence, fails to carry out its duties of punishment, protection and deterrence – or, even worse, actually gives succour to criminals from specific groups carrying out specific types of crimes, such that the justice system has become a tyrannical enemy of the people and something destructive, not protective, of civilised society. This, I would argue, is the current situation in Europe, and most particularly in the UK, which is why Citizen Vigilante touches such a nerve.

Vigilantism is justified when society is in what might be called (after Locke) a pseudo state of nature, when the government and justice system have regressed or deteriorated into a state before a justice system has been fully established. Vigilantes concern themselves with what should be the concern of the state but which either aren’t addressed at all or are treated with such leniency that a travesty of justice occurs. The vigilante takes back the natural rights he handed over to the state in return for protection and a stable society in which to live when the state has let the his world descend into a dangerous chaos, with state-favoured groups given tacit permission or relative impunity for violence, even, as in the UK, sexual violence on a staggering mass scale.

Occasionally we do read about cases where someone has taken revenge for rape or the murder of a child. The most notorious of such cases, not least because it was the most cinematic and was carried out in the court itself, is that of Marianne Bachmeier, who in 1981 shot Klaus Grabowski, who had raped and murdered her seven year-old daughter Anna, with a Beretta 70 she’d sneaked into the Lubeck court. What’s notable about this case is that Bachmeier was able to calmly let off seven shots at Grotowski before being gently apprehended once her clip had emptied. Such cases, and in fact any kind of vigilantism, are extremely rare because very few people are in fact capable of killing, which is why most acts of vengeance for child murder are carried out in prison by seasoned killers.

Why Citizen Vigilante is correct

The three charges that Sanders makes in the film are that there is a hostile takeover taking place via mass immigration, that migrants are significantly over-represented in crime, particularly in sexual crimes, and that it is being facilitated by political elites conjoined with the deliberate leniency of Europe’s justice systems. Variety claims that migrant rapists and random stabbers are scapegoats and ‘bogeymen’. I would argue on the contrary that not only is Sanders correct, but that the character somewhat understates the situation.

Since the early 2000s around 1,000 people have been killed in Islamist attacks on European soil, the worst being the Madrid train bombings of 2004, with 193 fatalities, whilst hundreds of attacks have been foiled. In the UK more than 40,000 Islamists are on the terror watch list. Globally, Islamists have carried out 60,000-80,000 attacks over the past 50 years, killing roughly 250,000 people. Since 2013, reported rapes have risen in Germany by 162%, in Sweden by 500%, in the UK by 109%.

In Germany, foreigners make up 16% of the population but 47.4% of its prison population. In Sweden, foreigners make up 9% of the population but 41 % of the prison population, whilst in the UK the figures are better, with foreigners making up 12% of the population, with roughly the same percentage in the prison population. However, they make up 25% of those convicted of rape and 28% of those convicted for sexual assault.

What about some of the home countries of migrants? In Pakistan, in 2024 alone there were 5,339 cases of rape, including 2,142 cases of gang rape, and this is in a country in which rape and sexual assault are known to be significantly underreported. In Morocco it’s thought that over 20% of women have been sexually abused, whilst in Afghanistan 46% of women have been sexually or physically assaulted. In this country, child prostitution is prevalent and women who complain of rape are often accused of adultery and can be executed. 33% of women in Africa have been raped or sexually assaulted and UNICEF says that over 79 million African women in sub-Saharan Africa experience rape or sexual assault before the age of 18.

What about the claims of impunity and leniency from judges in Europe? The kind of cases for which Sanders executes the judges in Citizen Vigilante are not outliers, but legion – something you’ll know from X, but not from reading the Guardian. Here are a few recent ones: Aman Samater, who is of Somali heritage and had 11 previous convictions, abducted two girls in Teesside and got just 18 months, the defence arguing that the “incident was relatively short”. Nitesh Nitesh took part in the rape of a child and got six years. Faisal Baruud plied a 15 year-old with alcohol before sexually assaulting her, and got three years. Afghan asylum seeker Ahmad Mulakhil abducted and raped a 12 year-old and got 16 years. In Sweden an Eritrean rapist escaped deportation because the rape “didn’t last long enough”, and in Germany, a woman who insulted a migrant who took part in a gang rape received a longer sentence for her remark than the rapist.

This is not merely down to the degeneracy of individual judges. Looking at the case of the UK, if the government has a longstanding policy of bringing in large numbers of migrants to plug workforce ‘gaps’, and if many of these are young men from states where sexual assault often goes unpunished, then relative impunity for such crimes in the UK is inevitably going to follow.

Impunity for migrant crime isn’t limited to sexual crimes: in even the smallest town we see the evidence of money laundering, people trafficking, trade in contraband cigarettes and drug dealing with every ‘Turkish’ barbers, vape shop, nail bar and mini mart to which the authorities are turning a blind eye, Again, this impunity for criminal activity is regarded by many elites as a necessity so that migrants can be successfully accommodated in the country.

This situation of relative impunity has come about in the UK partly through the joint influence of the Judicial Appointments Commission and the Sentencing Council. The Judicial Appointments Commission, formed in 2006 to remove the appointment of judges from the bailiwick of the Justice Secretary, is characterised by a strong Left-wing political bias. Dozens of the immigration judges it has appointed have had links to activist groups that advocate (and facilitate) mass immigration, while the commission itself has several diversity programs, such as the Diversity Support Initiative and the Judicial Diversity Forum.

Recently, prosecutors have been told that they must consider their unconscious bias before charging ethnic minority suspects, and Shabana Mahmood has decided that appeals from failed asylum seekers will not be heard by judges at all, but from members of the public who will, inevitably, be “recruited from diverse backgrounds”.

What about the notion of a ‘takeover’? 5-7% of Indians say that they would like to move to the West: that’s 70-100 million people, whilst around 40% of Africans would like to move to the West: that’s 620 million people. Encouraging mass immigration is a profoundly irrational way to run a state, most especially a welfare state. But open borders is an ideology, not a set of rational policies. Now, being pro-immigration has become the latest progressive middle-class cult, much like trans and Palestine, against which no data, common sense, observed reality or even self-interest has any power to persuade.

Adherence to this catastrophic ideology has a range of motivations. With many it is a mere matter of social mimesis, peer group conformism and class loyalty. For others it’s their comfortable middle-class living: there are dozens of NGOs and charities as well as community groups that advocate for and help migrants, with names like Asylum Aid, Asylum Welcome, Migrant Help, the Refugee Council, Refugee Resource and so on (a common thread in funding is George Soros’s Open Society Foundations). These NGOs pushing mass migration act as a shadow arm of government.

Since 1997, 11.5 million people have come to the UK. Britain’s non-white population in 1945 was just under 1% and by 1996 was still just 5%. A year later, in 1997, the first serious wave of mass immigration began. Ten years later, that figure had more than doubled to 13%. It’s hard to keep up with the ruses to bring more migrants into the country over the years and which continue today. The latest is Shabana Mahmood’s Community Sponsorship Scheme, whereby charities, community groups, mosques, NGOs and individuals can sponsor migrants to come here. It’s certain to be as open to abuse as the Skilled Worker sponsorship scheme, which has brought in 1.8 million people since it started. Every day it seems that some new scandalous figure regarding migration is released. Last week we heard that just 12 ‘health workers’ from Cameroon sponsored a total of 180 family workers, 257 Ghanian workers brought in 2,131 dependants, 139 Bangladeshi workers brought in 747 “family members”, whilst 2,395 Indian workers sponsored 10,504 extra people. The ‘Boriswave’ brought in just over one million Indians to the UK, and more recently Labour’s UK-India trade deal means that employers do not have to pay seconded Indian workers’ National Insurance contributions.

At the same time, we are subject to relentless pro-immigration propaganda and to blatant, legally enshrined preferential treatment of ethnic minorities in every sector in terms of employment, which the Equalities Act 2010 was designed to facilitate. In academia and employment entry requirements and standards are dropped, and in the interests of ‘anti-racism’ every public body or institution that receives public funding has a mandatory diversity agenda.

Cheap labour has always been one of the main drivers of mass immigration, which is why business and the Conservative Party, despite what they may have said publicly on the issue, have always liked it. As it results in communities with extreme social conservatism as well as high rents and frozen or depressed blue-collar wages you would think that the Left would reject it. Until the 2010s being anti-globalisation was core to the Left, now, but Left-wingers are now often vehemently pro-globalisation and shill for corporations, especially Big Pharma (corporations very cannily went woke as a response to the protests of the 2010s, promoting luxury beliefs that would not affect their bottom line).

That the Left hasn’t rejected it comes down to ideology and longer term aims. The Left and the corporate Right agree not only in their pro-migrant stance but also in their shared belief that the general populace could, and ought to be, reduced to identical, interchangeable production-consumption units – for the Right because it greases the wheels of the economy, for the Left because it promotes ‘equality’. Distinction, in both meanings of the word, is to be rejected, and this in part explains the wholesale rejection of merit everywhere that has led to a universal competency crisis.

The progressive dream is above all one in which there will no longer be any nation states, in which a state of complete ‘equity’ pertains, in a world that is post-racial, after a long-enough period of inter-racial breeding. This ending of nation states is not possible without destroying disparate European countries and their discrete, unique cultures. The most efficient, perhaps the only way to do this is through culture-erasing mass immigration. The ultimate aim of multiculturalism is not a vibrant heterogeneity, which is what the world had, between cultures and nations, up until the late 90s, but complete homogeneity. Any difficulties on the path to this flattening out, including crime and civil strife, however horrific and violent, are seen as a necessary, unavoidable quid pro quo that must be tolerated.

This has been explicit at the UN and the EU (formerly EEC) since the end of the Second World War, and has been promulgated by some highly influential thinkers whose thought has had a trickle-down effect, such that multiculturalism has ossified into an unquestioned shibboleth among much of the Left. Chief among these thinkers was Russian-French Hegelian philosopher-turned-Eurocrat Alexandre Kojève, an adviser to French Presidents and ministers until 1968, one of the architects of post-war European reconstruction and a great influence on post-colonial thought. His ideas were important influences on French and EEC policy, and he had a direct role in the formation of the EEC and formulated the components of the Treaty of Rome.

Kojève saw the EEC, later the EU, as the first step towards what he called “a universal homogeneous state”, a “post-historical” world without class or any other kinds of distinction, including racial ones in which “everything had already been taken” and would just need equitably redistributing. GATT and UNCTAD, both of which he was heavily involved in, were seen as paths towards complete international equalisation. He championed a “giving colonialism” whereby a portion of wealth and income of Western countries would simply be given away to the Third World, something which first manifested itself in huge Third World aid budgets. Kojève’s contention was that history was the process of all humans having their desire for “recognition” satisfied so that they could live their lives as “automatons” in a state of “contented slumber” after politics had been reduced to a mixture of “grazing” and “accumulation”.

Of course, he was quite mad, but we are living out his ideas in Europe. No let-up in mass migration can be allowed, let alone a reversal, and all criticism and questioning of it must be suppressed. This is also why X is in the sights of the UK Government and the EU, and why Citizen Vigilante is seen as so dangerous. It won’t, however, as some claimed, lead to a new freedom to talk about the issues it raised. Such discussions are doomed to remain on the margins. Unarmed, pusillanimous, mired in precarity, distracted, inhibited by a punitive state from even questioning the establishment consensus in migrant crime, vigilantism even on a small scale is just a fever dream. However, voting away this insane trajectory is just as much a fever dream.

James Pyman is a pseudonym.